The Raymond Chandler Lookalike Contest : RAYMOND CHANDLER’S PHILIP MARLOWE A Centennial Celebration,<i> edited by Byron Preiss (Alfred A. Knopf: $18.95; 352 pp. 0-394-57327-7) </i>

Hard-boiled fiction is a lean, mean revolution that has grown soft and fat on its own success. American writers, fed up with effete British detective stories that focused as much on tea cozies as corpses, decided to liven things up by adding a dose of reality and a dash of style. Carroll John Daly, who favored lines such as “Dead? He was as cold as an old maid’s smile,” fired the first shot when he published a short story called “The False Burton Combs” in the December, 1922, issue of a magazine called Black Mask. Then came the big guns: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, all intent, in Chandler’s often-quoted words, on “getting murder away from the upper classes, the weekend house party and the vicar’s rose garden and back to the people who are really good at it.”

Did they succeed? And how. Hard-boiled fiction has become a literary growth industry paralleled only by the boom in romantic fiction. Every year yet another brace of Chandler imitators roars out of the blocks to admiring reviews from critics and sizable sales to readers hungry for even a taste of the savory satisfactions the originals gave. The ever-irascible Chandler, who liked to refer to himself as “just a beat-up pulp writer . . . In the United States I ranked slightly above a mulatto,” would surely be astonished by the mushrooming of the style he helped pioneer.

With success, however, has come inevitable flabbiness. Today’s Chandler imitators, even the best of them, are just that, imitators, unable to match the excitement that is generated only by writing that is provocatively original. The situation got so bad that Donald Westlake, whose Parker novels (“Parker steals. Parker kills. It’s a living”) are in fact the best hard-boiled work of the last 25 years, was moved to make a speech about it a few years back.

“I try to inhale and I don’t sense any air here,” Westlake said of the current state of the genre. “What are these books? What do they connect to? The brevity of those early Black Mask days is long gone. The relevance of those days is gone. The vitality of novelty is gone. The reflections of any underlying trust is gone. I’m not really sure what’s left.”

What’s left is the desire to cash in, a desire that even as prestigious a publisher as Alfred A. Knopf, which first published Chandler and Hammett in book form, can’t seem to resist. A few months ago, Knopf came out with a hardcover edition of “Woman in the Dark,” one of Hammett’s more forgettable novelettes, and now comes “Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration.”

To commemorate the 100th year of the writer’s birth, packager Byron Preiss came up with what must have seemed like a good idea at the time, something reasonably dignified and quintessentially lucrative: Contact 23 current mystery writers and have each one of them write a story with Marlowe as detective solving crimes left and right. Add “The Pencil,” Chandler’s last story. You can almost hear those cash registers ringing already.

Not all writers contacted, however, were delighted. Joseph Hansen, for one, made it known that he felt the idea was “somewhat akin to grave-robbing. Philip Marlowe is a creation of the imaginative mind of Raymond Chandler, and I don’t believe every Tom, Dick and Harry has the right to lay claim to him. Ethically, you can’t do that.”

Even more likely suspects than Hansen are missing from the list, though whether it’s because they weren’t asked or because they turned the task down is impossible to say. Westlake isn’t here, probably for obvious reasons, and neither is Lawrence Block, the odds-on best of the current hard-boiled writers, or Robert Parker, the most popular.

Still, the list contains considerable first-rate talent, people such as Loren D. Estleman, Dick Lochte, Sara Paretsky, Roger L. Simon and Jonathan Valin. And the writers clearly tried to rise to the occasion, often putting in nuggets of detective trivia for fans to relish. One story has Marlowe reading Paul Cain’s “Fast One,” one of the legendary hard-boiled novels; another has him yearning for the powder-blue suit cognoscenti know he wore in the opening of “The Big Sleep”; a third has Marlowe running into Chandler himself.

There are some new twists when it comes to plots--the use of subject matter such as child molestation, for instance, which would have been taboo in Chandler’s day. But mostly it’s the usual round of missing persons and blackmail, small errands that turn into big trouble. The best stories, interestingly enough, are the ones that succeed in capturing the whiff of melancholia that blew through Marlowe’s life like the famous Red Wind. Mostly, however, these tales are simply too derivative to be seriously involving. What made Chandler’s stories so readable was not that Marlowe was in them but that they were written with a verve that mere copies, no matter how well-intentioned or clever, cannt hope to match. While the writers clearly had fun paying homage to a man they rightfully respect, sharing in their enthusiasm is something else again.